Senate Democrats suggested this week they would support President Obama using executive action to unilaterally close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, despite Congress recently passing a bill that essentially prohibits him from shuttering the facility.
While no one has gone so far as to openly encourage the president to close the controversial military prison through an executive order, senior Senate Democrats are opening the door to that possibility.
“I think there reaches a point where Congress is just being stubborn. They are just opposing everything he suggests, and he has to make decisions in the best interests of the country, and I think closing Guantanamo is one of them,” Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told the Washington Post this week, deferring to Obama’s authority as a “constitutional scholar” to find a legal path to close Gitmo.
Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Congress has “spoken” on what they want to happen with the detention center through a vote on the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes prohibitions on transferring detainees to the United States, Syrian, Libya, Yemen and Somalia, limiting where Obama can both transfer those cleared for release and permanently house those who can not be freed.
But Reid suggested the president may be searching for some wiggle room around the restrictions in the defense policy bill.
“He’s going to sign the bill and then he’ll determine whether or not he has any administrative authority to do anything different than what’s in that bill,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pointed out that the military prison was opened without any authorization from Congress, “so you know, what you can build, you can take apart too, it seems to me,” she told the Post.
Meanwhile, Republicans are seething over the president’s possible use of another executive action to go around a congressional blockade. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said this week he would take Obama to court if the president tries to use executive authority in this situation.
McCain, a supporter of closing the prison, has tried to work with the administration to pitch a plan to Congress to close it, but has said he’s been waiting for the plan for months. The plan will have to look at the cost and logistics of moving those prisoners who can not be released to another location, likely in the United States.
Officials from the Pentagon have visited military, state and federal prisons in Kentucky, Colorado and South Carolina to gather details for the report to Congress.
Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters this week that the administration expected to send the finished plan to Capitol Hill “soon.”
